November 18, 2004
The Triumph of Liberalism
By: Dave Stratman Editor, New Democracy
The electoral campaign has finally crawled to its dreary and foreseeable end: the victory of George W. Bush, anti-"red state" hysteria and despair among Kerry supporters, and the effective end of the antiwar movement.
Those millions of Americans appalled at the continuing carnage in Iraq must step back from the electoral debacle and draw the right lessons from it, beginning by examining the role of the Democratic Party and the liberal agenda in the antiwar movement.
The struggle against the War on Terror, or whatever name we wish to give the policy of pre-emptive wars endorsed by both candidates, is the most important struggle of our lifetimes. To succeed in it, we need now to establish a new antiwar movement on a broader popular basis than the one which chose to self-destruct in the Kerry campaign. To do this we must first step outside the mind-set which dismisses as mere bigotry the moral concerns of Americans who oppose gay marriage and abortion and other items on the liberal agenda such as gun control and affirmative action, but who are also deeply opposed to this criminal war.
The new movement must welcome into the fold people from the right and the left. It must use no liberal litmus test for membership. Opposition to the war must be the only criterion.
The bleak outcome of the electoral campaign shows the enduring effectiveness of liberalism as the key strategy of social control by the US ruling elite. In a nation where people from all walks of life and political philosophies opposed a war based on lies, the organized antiwar movement embraced a narrow liberal agenda which excluded millions of people opposed to the war. Because of the perceived weakness of this self-isolating self-definition, all but a few elements of the antiwar movement then allowed themselves to be corralled into the Democratic Party and to accept as their leader a pro-war candidate.
By its astonishing docility the liberal antiwar movement proclaimed loud and clear to the US corporate elite that it had nothing to fear, that liberals would be loyal and true even to a candidate calling for mass murder and victory in Iraq, as long as he kept reasonably ambivalent about gay marriage and abortion.
The post-election U.S. onslaught on Fallujah should come as no surprise to anyone. It wasn’t Bush’s 51-49% win that made more devastation in Iraq a certainty, but the fact that the antiwar movement allowed the Democratic Party to define the movement’s goals and methods and its relationship to the people. With both candidates promising victory in Iraq, what else could happen once the polls closed, whoever the victor may have been? It was not Bush but the War Party, comprising both Democrats and Republicans, that was unleashed by the electoral campaign.
The Democratic Party and John Kerry performed exactly the task they set out to do and for which they received hundreds of millions in corporate largesse: they wed the antiwar movement to the pro-war Democratic Party, and thereby deprived it of life and purpose–until the movement is organized on a new basis.
Since the days of FDR, the role of the Democratic Party has been to undermine the self-confidence and unity of the working class and lead it away from direct action, like the sit-down strikes that swept the nation and had governors and industrialists in the1930s in fear of impending revolution. In the 2004 campaign it performed its role to perfection. Bush as candidate was vulnerable as few incumbent presidents have been. He had lied his way into a war rejected by most of the American people. He had led an assault on civil liberties alarming to citizens of all stripes. He was the first president since Herbert Hoover to bring American workers a net loss of jobs over his term. He had demolished the greatest federal surplus in history to create the greatest deficit. He had created in No Child Left Behind a federal assault on public schools that engendered unprecedented opposition from parents, teachers, local school boards and state legislators.
But the Kerry campaign refused to mobilize the huge majority of Americans who have been severely harmed by these policies. On the contrary, the campaign demobilized people, sucking the life out of issues that people cared deeply about and leaving them with nothing but "Anybody But Bush" hysteria. Kerry went out of his way to support the war in Iraq and to protect Bush from serious attack. Kerry refused to expose the Patriot Act and its assault on the Constitution. He endorsed the "War on Terror" and said that he would pursue it more vigorously than Bush. Kerry declined to propose measures to reverse the ravages of NAFTA on American working people and the outsourcing of jobs. He failed to criticize the No Child Left Behind atrocity, instead calling for it to be fully funded.
Why did Kerry not lead the way in opposing the war and loss of civil liberties and loss of jobs and the attack on public education? Why did he not further energize a base that was already in motion, already crying out for action on these issues?
The answer is obvious: Kerry did not lead on these issues because he and his party in fact support all these attacks on ordinary Americans. Kerry voted for the war in Iraq (as did the Democratic leadership in Congress) and for the Patriot Act (as did most Democrats) and for NAFTA (engineered by Bill Clinton) and for No Child Left Behind (co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy) because he believes in them and because they represent the interests of the wealthy class he serves. The primary goal of the Democratic Party and Senator Kerry in the campaign, more important even than gaining the presidency, was precisely what they achieved: to demobilize and demoralize working people and split them into hostile camps.
The real problem, of course, is not with people who found themselves voting or working for Kerry but with a political system which has made people feel powerless to take any action themselves beyond voting. Change has never been achieved in the US through voting. It has always taken mass popular action by millions of people in their workplaces, their schools, their communities, their streets to create change. This has always been true in the past–in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement–and it is true now.
What next for the millions of Americans who remain deeply opposed to this war and to the whole set of anti-democratic policies in which it is enmeshed?
We need to step outside the Democratic Party to form enduring, popularly-controlled, democratic organizations with which we can challenge the direction of our society. The new antiwar movement must find its energy and its power in the ability of millions of people across the country to take concrete action themselves in the communities and workplaces against the War Machine. We need to build a mass movement of refusal to cooperate with Empire, and we need to figure out practical ways to do it. Never again should the antiwar movement line up behind a pro-war candidate because we prefer his Eastern liberal style. Never again should we let our goals be set by capitalist politicians. Never again should we abandon direct action to let politicians act for us.
We have a huge task before us. That task is not to elect another politician to office–even one who, unlike Kerry, might actually oppose Empire. Our task is much larger but doable. That task is to dismantle the Military-Industrial Complex and disarm the War Machine. If we are serious about this task and stay focused on the issue, we will find ourselves surrounded by many millions of new allies–new not because they weren’t there before, but new because we just couldn’t see them.
Dave Stratman edits NewDemocracyWorld.org and is author of We CAN Change The World: The Real Meaning Of Everyday Life. You can reach him at newdem@aol.com.
Posted by rowan at November 18, 2004 7:48 PM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |I wholeheardly agree; however I doubt very seriously if I will be walking lockstep with anti-gay, anti-choice, people,etc. I will continue to oppose this war as I have, by protesting, telling others, writing letters and everything else I can think of within non violencent means including civil disobedience. I am a Veteran and I do not hesitate to tell people I am a veteran that opposes this war. I will encourage everyone I can.....but I know full well there are those who will never join me and I am not sure that I want them.
Posted by: Bill at November 19, 2004 5:37 PMThe way it looks to me is coastal snots against the heartland. The wine-and-cheese folk against pickups with gun racks. Texas against Massachusetts. Maybe that's too simple, but I'm not going to admit it. I don't have to.
It was the cultural divide. The coastal snots have enormous contempt for Texas, Oklahoma, the South, and any other place where people can change a flat tire. Along the Northeast Corridor the snots talk of rednecks, express wonderment that some of them can read, and regard them as barbarians inhabiting blank spaces on the map with dragons drawn in them. For snots in Massachusetts, most of the country is just an inconvenience in getting to the other coast. Flyover Land. They think that people in Alabama live naked in the forest and eat grubs they dig out of stumps.
The pickup people are tired of it. And the cheese people just found out.
A lot of columnists and talking heads on the coasts thought that the election was going to be a referendum on the war in Iraq. I doubt it was. Nobody in the middle of the country knows, or cares, anything about the world outside the United States. Nobody in Massachusetts knows anything, or cares much, about the world inside the United States. The Bush people have never heard of the Crimea. The Kerry people have barely heard of Texas.
This is why I'd like Texas to make my domestic policy, and Massachusetts my foreign policy. Or maybe have both of them just go away.
People in Oklahoma, I'll bet you, are tired to the eyeballs of coastal, septic, hypersexual sludge forced on their children by Hollyork, of music so foul that you wouldn't clean a toilet with it, of galloping repression of a religion that matters to them, of abortion without representation, of the constant pressure to give up their guns, which they enjoy, because subhuman inner-city savages back East kill everybody who goes into a Seven-Eleven, of the Latinization of America, and of schools run by federal fools so meddlesome and perverted that they would defile a landfill.
It's as obvious as warts on a Prom queen (sez me, anyway) that a whole lot of people are sick of having their lives controlled by people they can't stand, sick of being messed with from afar, sick of affirmative action and racial preferences and partial-birth abortion, the old Sandy Day O'Connor Brain Suck. Well, they just said so.
Me too, by the way. If Bush had campaigned on a promise to toss the Supreme Court into an industrial grinder, I would have voted. For him. And I can't stand him.
Which brings us to the Feddle Gummint. Between the coasts it's seen as the enforcement arm of the coastal snots - a gray, repressive, stupid, intrusive, and alien force, as degrading as having your leg humped by the dog in somebody else's living room. To a lot of people, Washington isn't the capital of their country. It's The Enemy. It pushes on them everything they loathe. They hate it.
Bush somehow feels as if he were with the people against Washington's inroads, though he isn't. In fact he favors bigger and more intrusive government, and spends as Hillary could only dream. But he's against gun control and abortion, the emotional hot issues. That's enough.
When you have seen a thousand impassioned sheep waving witless placards at a political rally, you realize that facts don't matter. Look and feel are everything. Bush and Kerry are both pampered ineffectual rich brats, one a drunk, the other a gigolo. Kerry comes from Massachusetts, though, and you just know he eats curious salads with strange names. By contrast, Bush has a certain ferret-like pugnacity to him and a low-wattage mind that people between the coasts are comfortable with. He isn't going to use any of them high-falutin' words, because he honestly doesn't know them. He won't confuse anyone.
People in Kansas aren't stupid - not given the admittedly sorry baseline for humanity. They are intensely local, though, and use their minds for practical things. When it comes to foreign policy they are better on principle than detail. I keep reading that sixty-some percent of Republicans believe that Iraq did New York. (Given what Republicans generally think of New York, I'm not sure why they aren't grateful.) They know that somebody did something bad to us, and they want to smack the bejesus out of someone for it. That's principle. "Smack who" is a detail.
Bush looks like (and is) a Texan who isn't going to take any crap. For people who have taken an awful lot of it from Washington for awfully long, that's appealing. Whether he has the slightest idea what he's doing doesn't matter. He sounds conservative and patriotic if you don't pay too much attention to what he is saying. He is against ter and terrace. He wants to protect America and smack them infiddles upside the head. It's the spirit of the thing.
There is horror on the coasts over the influence of evangelical Christians. How much evangelical Christianity has to do with Christianity, I don't know. Sometimes it looks to me more like an assertion of independence from federal intrusiveness than a religious awakening. However spiritual it may or may not be, it is an organized, satisfying way of hating the bastards on the coasts.
Hallelujah.
Rational people, always at a disadvantage in American politics, wonder how Christians can favor bombing cities. Jesus, they say in puzzlement, didn't seem to be persuasively bloodthirsty. True, but irrelevant.
You have to understand that Christians have never regarded the teachings of Christ as authoritative. Christians are as savage a clan as can be found, matched only by Moslems, Jews, and Shintoists. And probably everybody else. Check the headlines.
As the Kerry people believe in separation of church and state, evangelicals believe in separation of church and behavior. What you do isn't the point. It's whose side you are on. In a country where everybody hates everybody else, that matters. And, as we just discovered, it did matter.
I don't think Bush is a Texan, he and his family are closer the Mass. "snots" as you refer to them. Kennebunkport is to hell and gone from Dallas !
Posted by: Bill at November 20, 2004 2:29 PMThis ranting post above is so reminscent of Goesh I could almost swear it was one and the same person. Some very interesting thematic commonalities.
And what ridiculous, unbridled blather. As if anyone who didn't want an abortion has EVER been forced to get one. You can do whatever the hell you want with your body, but keep your hands off of mine. As for the immoral sludge you squeal about, as if anyone has to watch anything they don't chose to watch ... oh, except of course for 1.5 seconds of Janet Jackson's Oh-so-offensive nipple. What blatant, arrogant appropriating of morality.
"It's as obvious as warts on a Prom queen (sez me, anyway) that a whole lot of people are sick of having their lives controlled by people they can't stand, sick of being messed with from afar, sick of affirmative action and racial preferences and partial-birth abortion, the old Sandy Day O'Connor Brain Suck. Well, they just said so."--I don't see warts on a Prom Queen as obvious, or even relevant. What anger in there, what complete and utter aggression.
And I find it fascinating that you confidently lump all "Christians" into one category and then have the conceit to speak for them. I'm a Christian who would never allow you to speak for me, I can guarantee I am not alone.
"People in Kansas aren't stupid - not given the admittedly sorry baseline for humanity."--what kind of blanket, OBTUSE statement is this? As if any Democrat ever emerged with an assumption that the entire state of Kansas is stupid. And your elitist comment about the "sorry baseline for humanity" speaks worlds about your respect for others.
"The pickup people are tired of it. And the cheese people just found out."--So now we are "cataloguing" people based on what they drive and what they consume. I'll just leave it at that.
"subhuman inner-city savages back East kill everybody who goes into a Seven-Eleven, of the Latinization of America, and of schools run by federal fools so meddlesome and perverted that they would defile a landfill."--I'm going to call this for exactly what it is, complete, utter, racist dravel, not even worth the time it took for me to point it out. How DARE you speak of the "latinization of America" as if it is degrading the precious US of A. Native peoples occupied a good portion of this land long before the xenophobic anglo ever came to this country, and Latin-Americans held huge territories in the southwest. Suddenly they are Latinizing America? Think of how ludicrous that is. What, Americans are just bathed in Latinization, like some kind of spray paint? Some irresistable staining?
"Bush looks like (and is) a Texan who isn't going to take any crap. For people who have taken an awful lot of it from Washington for awfully long, that's appealing. Whether he has the slightest idea what he's doing doesn't matter. He sounds conservative and patriotic if you don't pay too much attention to what he is saying. He is against ter and terrace. He wants to protect America and smack them infiddles upside the head. It's the spirit of the thing."--what IS this tirade?
I'll stop there.
Posted by: Pamela at November 20, 2004 9:33 PM